torsdag 10 december 2009

Truth? Meta-truth?

Yes, I agree 100%!!!But have you not just stated a truth? The truth of probablism? You have not only made a socially acceptable statement, you have also appealed to facts and scientific findings, in other words, your statement below is truer or at least claims to be truer than what it is opposing. That's the nature of statements. And we do present a look into the reality of existence with sharper eyes than what say a primitivist being without access to modern science could ever claim.To kill "the truth" as concept, you still need a "meta-truth" to replace the truth. Because there must be a quality to your statement for it to win approval. Words may change over time, but numbers actually do not. And science deals with numbers and not words, it is the interpretation of science we should be careful with. But science's own progress is undeniable. Don't you agree?UshtaAlexander/often uses Hegel against Deleuze...

2009/12/11 Special Kain

Oh, well, I'm not a Deleuzian philosopher. Deleuze was an outrageously eccentric thinker whose thought was fresh and provoking, but I often disagree with him.

I have a problem with what's allegedly «timeless», because I erased the word «truth» from my philosophical vocabulary and replaced it with «functionality» (thanks to Peirce) nine years ago. The thing with probabilism (which is a much better name than indeterminism that's as much a negative definition as atheism) is that there's nothing timeless anymore. That's also the reason why I don't think that we actually increasingly look with ever sharper eyes into the conditions of existence.

What we think and speak and practice are increasingly or newly sophisticated vocabularies on the basis of functionality and intersubjective agreement (and that's my inner scientist speaking right now). And you probably remember that I was still into Daoism when I first showed up on Ushta. So Daoism is a brilliant philosophy, but Zoroastrianism is much more activist in nature and therefore much more appealing to someone like me.

But I 110% agree that only probabilism or equally indeterministic theories can seriously explain «freedom of choice» - both in principle and as a process and/or its outcome. Spinoza's super-rationalist can only adjust his attitude, but there's no freedom of choice (and Deleuze makes the same mistake). Nietzsche was a bit more ambivalent about this matter, since his «Übermensch» is a relentless creativity machine that's consciously deciding how to combine their components in order to become an overwhelmingly fascinating work of art.

And probabilism isn't relativism, which is all the better. There are physical laws or other cosmologically and biologically interesting «habits» within different probabilities manifest. So you have a 99% chance that X will happen, while you'd have to put much more effort into a process if a 13% chance should increase in order to make Y happen. Only probabilism allows for the shaping of reality. Relativism doesn't allow for anything: if anything goes, then nothing's going on at all.

That's exactly the difference between freedom and «whateverism» («Beliebigkeit» in German).